Paris 2024: French people's support for the Olympic Games remains unclear (2024)

Against a background of ongoing tension, the Paris 2024 Olympic Games are here. But among the French population, there's indifference (36%), concern (24%) and even anger (5%) according to a survey (IFOP-Fiducial for Sud Radio, carried out on July 15 and 16, on a representative sample of 1,504 people). The poll suggested that the country's hosting of the world's biggest sporting event is still not thrilling the crowds. There's a faint stirring, however: 23% of those polled said they felt "satisfaction" when thinking about these Games, compared with 11% at the end of May.

It's probably time to move on from close examination of the numbers. For Paris 2024 is now a concrete reality. The Games are about to begin. For almost three weeks, not only the Paris region, but also several other cities (Marseille, Bordeaux, Nantes, Saint-Etienne, Lille, Lyon, Châteauroux and Nice) and even Teahupoo, a small town of 1,500 inhabitants in Tahiti, in French Polynesia, will be nothing but a vast sports ground. Over 10,000 athletes are expected to take part. All are hoping to achieve the performance that will earn them a lifelong pass to glory.

Obviously, between 2013 – the year of the first meetings aimed at relaunching a bid to host the Summer Games, after the bitter failures of 1992, 2008 and 2012 – and today, nothing (or almost nothing) has gone according to plan. The list of calamities that have befallen the Paris 2024 project would be too long to list. Let's just mention a few major ones: France's worst ever terrorist attacks, a pandemic and wars in Europe and the Middle East.

Time has taken its toll, and some of the men and women who ensured that Paris would host the Summer Games for the first time in a century are no longer with us. Some have died, notably Bernard Lapasset in 2023, the first leader of Paris 2024. Others have moved on. Five sports ministers steered the Olympics between 2013 and 2024: Valérie Fourneyron, Thierry Braillard, Laura Flessel, Roxana Maracineanu and Amélie Oudéa-Castéra. The latter is now in a caretaker role, following the government's resignation afret the snap elections that saw President Emmanuel Macron lose his majority at the Assemblée Nationale, less than three weeks before the start of the Games.

A strange signal

Today, it's impossible to stop the clock and hope to change anything. The first athletes have arrived at the Olympic venues and village, all completed on schedule. Now it's their turn to take to the track for the quadrennial event that haunts their days and nights. And with the Olympics being nothing like we imagined, do remember that the competitions begin on Wednesday, July 24.

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